Rahm's gadfly concerned about 'white negro'

A Chicago reader sent on a footnote to the scrap this week between a conservative radio reporter and a TV reporter covering Rahm Emanuel that is so eyebrow-raising that it seems worth passing on.

The incident was played on Drudge and elsewhere as the Chicago press shielding Emanuel from questions. But the questioner, William J. Kelly, is actually a fairly well-known Chicago figure, a Republican former State Comptroller candidate currently exploring a bid for alderman. Perhaps most notably, however, he's the author of a self-published 1995 manifesto called "The Rghts of the Middle Class: Advent of the Rebel Conservative," a sort of Breitbart before his time and apparent fan of the work of Norman Mailer.

I was able to find the book on Amazon, and the highlights seemed to make it worth revisiting the incident. The book focuses on the concern that the white middle class is being undermined by the spread of inner-city black culture by white liberals, and pays repeated tribute to Norman Mailer's 1957 essay, "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster."

From Kelly's book:

A high incidence of black males now typify the elements ascribed to them in Norman Mailer's White Negro — the psychopath, the sexual predator, the gratificationalist, the moral relativist, and the so-called ‘middle-class made’ criminal. Remember, it was this art of the primitive and this morality of the bottom that the architects promoted as the cultural icons of their new utopian society.

And:

Criminals should be made to pay for their crimes through hard work. Prisons should become hard labor camps and the money, thus earned, should be given to the victims of crime and their families.

And:

Yes, meet the White Negro, the worst of black and white, where the ghetto replaces the bungalow; and where the beginnings of a plan to destroy the middle class were being implemented.

And:

Do not be timid about employing trickery to get the information that you need. Above all, ingratiate yourself to the White Negro/Hipster planners. Feign ignorance whenever possible and open your ears to all the details that may soon come in handy.